Catching Heaven

by Sands Hall

  “Glad you made it, hon.” Ginger stood. “You’re late, Maud-girl, and so am I.” She hefted her breasts in her two hands, wincing. “Wish my period’d get here. They’re big and they’re sore.”

  “Don’t even talk to me about periods.” Jeep pulled on her leotard and turned sideways to the mirror. “Shit! I starve myself and I just get fatter and fatter and fatter.”

  “You are not fat.” Ginger squinted against cigarette smoke as she laced her boots. “Some asshole who shall remain nameless has been feeding you that crap again. Tell him to shove it. If he wants a little boy, no hips, no breasts, he should come out of the closet. You’re perfect.” Maud watched, astonished, as the caustic and cynical Ginger put an arm around Jeep.

  “No,” Jeep said, her voice high and tight. She splayed fingers over the pink satin that covered her belly, pushing in. “I sure am not. I keep wanting to be something different. Than what I am. I tell myself and tell myself I’m going to do it differently, I’m not going to get stuck. I wanted to get the hell out of here, I don’t want to be stuck. I don’t want to be stuck.”

  “You’re not stuck,” Maud said.

  Jeep rubbed at her forehead, shaking her head. She met Maud’s eyes in the mirror. “What the hell do you know.” She was in pink, pretty, blonde, curvaceous, Maud in turquoise, tall and dark. “You can get out. You waltzed in and you can just waltz right out. But I’m a fly with its goddamn feet stuck on a strip—” She grabbed a paper napkin off the table and dabbed at tears brimming in her eyes. “Just like everybody else in this goddamn town. You even try to leave, you even try to get out of the muck, you get sucked right back.”

  “Look. Hon.” Ginger mashed her cigarette onto a plate where ketchup pooled next to ancient french fries. “We’re all going to have to leave if Barney sees Trixie and Kathie and our other new girl with an -ie at the end of her name down there by their lonesomes.”

  Maud put her arm around Jeep. Again Jeep shrugged it off. “See you down there. We’ll have a shift drink later?”

  Jeep refused to meet her eyes.

  “Come on, girl,” Ginger said, “or Barney will have your ass served up with an apple in the crack.”

  “In a minute.” Jeep banged her locker door shut.

  Maud followed Ginger down the stairs. “What’s going on?”

  Ginger turned to look up at her, eyebrows raised. Maud felt herself flush in response to the disdain pouring at her. As if that were the answer to the question, Ginger pushed through the swinging door into the deafening noise in the bar: music, voices yelling over it, clank of glasses. “Your sweetie”—Ginger loaded the word with irony—“is sitting at table eight.” She disappeared into the mass of bodies lining the bar.

  Maud moved towards the piano. Having teased herself with the idea her visitor would be Driver or, more impossibly, Miles, it was a letdown to see the familiar tilt of cowboy hat, the stretch of long legs ending in boots crossed at the ankle. Rich turned. “Hello, beautiful lady.”

  She’d imagined this meeting a dozen ways, in scenarios that allowed her to cut him dead. “Hello, stranger,” she said with an archness she did not feel.

  He dropped his eyes to the cleavage her costume afforded, to her crimped waist and the satin triangle above her crotch. Her insides, behind that patch of satin, grew warm: There had been a particularly sweet tangle of limbs, a sideways rope-climbing posture.

  She felt Barney’s eyes boring into the back of her head. “I can’t talk.” Maud looked around as Jeep pushed through the swinging employee door. Across the room her eyes blazed. She grabbed her tray off the bar and strode into a crowd of skiers who’d just clumped in. Maud wanted to go to her, tell her it wasn’t what she thought, but Barney pushed himself away from the wall. She headed to the piano.

  At some point during a medley of up-tempo songs, Jeep dropped a folded cocktail napkin on the piano. Maud looked up, smiling, but Jeep was gone, leaving behind her a swirl of anger. Fingering triads with her left hand, Maud pulled the napkin towards her:

  Do you know “As Time Goes By”? We got married fifty years ago tonight, and that’s always been our song. It’d mean a lot to us if you could play it.

  Maud modulated through a series of chords that would bring her around to the beginning of the song.

  A kiss is but a kiss,

  A sigh is just a sigh.

  Fifty years, she thought as she sang about a kiss being just a kiss. If she married someone tomorrow, she would be ninety-two—ninety-two!—before she could say such a thing.

  The fundamental things apply

  As time goes by.

  “That last one was a request,” she said into the microphone. “Can you guess which two people in this room have been married fifty years? That’s their song.” She swung around on the stool. They weren’t hard to find; they were shining with pride. The woman waved, mouthing “Thank you.” Someone shouted an admiring “Whoa!” and started to clap. In a minute the whole room was applauding. “Fifty years,” Maud heard a woman say at a table near the piano. “Fifty years!” She was blonde, a touched-up blonde with eyes that looked tired. She scooted closer to the man beside her, wrapping his arm with her two hands.

  Maud looked to see what Rich’s response to all this might be. He was staring down at his boots. His hat tilted towards her like a blank face.

  Later, Ginger sauntered by and tossed another folded cocktail napkin. “Your cutiepie said to give you this.”

  “He is not my cutiepie,” Maud said to Ginger’s disappearing back. It was the first time Maud had seen Rich’s handwriting—a child-like scrawl, tiny, untidy letters slanting up the napkin.

  Great ass you’ve got.

  I had to go, something came up.

  Call me sometime.

  “Another song request?” the blonde woman asked. Maud shook her head. “Ah, a love note!” her date suggested. Out in the crowd somebody shouted “To Dream the Impossible Dreams” which Maud played. She rounded out the set as best she could, wondering when she would hear back about the teaching application she’d sent in to the college. The month of Twelfth Night performances would give her a hiatus from this job on weekends, but she needed, suddenly, desperately, to know that she would be doing something other than this to make a living.

  “I’m going to take a few minutes here,” she told the microphone.

  Behind the bar, Bart looked like a whirling dervish, reaching a hand high for a brandy snifter stored in the rack above his head, pouring the green froth of margaritas into glasses already on the bar, grabbing a napkin to place under a brandy glass, which he filled with one hand while using the other to deliver the margaritas to Trixie, waiting with her tray. Unwashed glassware filled the waitress station. Bodies three deep waved at him. Maud spotted Rich’s hat and his hawkish profile beneath it. Jeep’s bent, fishnetted knee almost touched his leg. He reached a hand to touch her, but she batted it away, talking fast. Rich looked at the floor, shaking his head. Jeep stalked away.

  Bart waved at Maud, crossed to the CD player, punched on a blast of guitar and drums. Maud made her way through the bodies that packed the bar, ignoring the florid-faced man who said, “Get me a margarita, hon. Double-quick this time.” She stumbled on the way up the stairs, unable to erase the moment: the hurt need in Jeep’s face, the hand Rich stretched to touch her cheek, the look in Jeep’s face as she slapped that touch away.

  She went back down before her break was over to look for Jeep, but as soon as she appeared Barney jerked his chin in the direction of the piano. The audience was responsive enough through the next two sets to allow her spirits to rise. She would buy Jeep a soda after work, explain she had nothing to do with Rich’s appearance at the Red Garter.

  But Trixie, sipping her shift beer at the bar, told Maud that Barney had let Jeep leave early—she’d been feeling sick. Maud decided to call her from home. She changed and clocked out, slipping out the back door of the hotel and heading across the parking lot, past the dumpsters, the shortcut to Ma
in Street. As she passed the heaps of plastic bags awaiting tomorrow’s trash pickup, she heard sobbing. She inched around the huge metal bins and found Jeep there, swaddled in a down parka several sizes too big for her.

  “Go away,” Jeep said as Maud knelt beside her. “Just go away.” Her face glistened, a mess of tears and snot and smeared mascara.

  The freeze of pavement worked its way quickly through Maud’s leggings. “Whatever you think I did, Jeep, I didn’t.”

  Jeep pushed away from her and tried to stand. “You and Lizzie,” she said, “you can both just go to hell.” Unable to keep her balance, she slid down the side of the dumpster. “I’m drunk,” she said. “I’m so goddamn drunk.”

  Maud put an arm around her. Jeep jerked away from it. “Both of you,” she said. “Just fuck off.” She swiped at her nose with a large leather mitten and watched the shiny thread of snot that connected her glove to her nostril. “You steal everything, that’s all you do, you’re snakes.”

  “I didn’t know Rich was going to come in, Jeep. I haven’t seen him since we broke up.” Maud wondered what Lizzie had done. She shifted her weight so she could crouch above instead of kneel on the freezing pavement.

  “No, no, no. Don’t go away. Don’t.” Jeep clutched at her. “Don’t go away, Maud.”

  “I’m not going away.”

  Jeep leaned her head back against the dumpster behind her, sobbing into the sky, an image of absolute despair.

  “Jeep, honey, it’s cold out here.”

  “I’m not going inside the Garter. I’m not going in there like this. Barney’s going to fire me anyway. No way he believed me when I told him I was sick. He knows I had a few.” She buried her face in Maud’s parka. “Everything’s as bad as it could be. I’m totally strung out on coke from yesterday. Why do I have to drink on top of everything else?”

  “Let’s go home,” Maud said. “It’s just a little way.”

  “Home?” Jeep gave a laugh that turned into a sob. “I should just stay here and die. Let the trash trucks take me away. It’s what I deserve.”

  “It’s what Rich deserves, maybe.”

  The mention of his name caused Jeep to wail. Maud crouched beside her again. “I didn’t ask him to come in. You have to know that. You guys are seeing each other now.”

  Jeep shook her head and drummed her heels against the pavement. “No. I hate him. Why’s Lizzie have to be so right? Again. Oh God, I want to die.”

  Maud got Jeep to her feet. Together they stumbled across the parking lot. Jeep paused at a curb, said, “Hold on a minute, sorry,” and threw up. When she was finished, she spat several times. Maud helped her kick enough snow to cover the patch of vomit. She managed to walk the rest of the way to Maud’s house without Maud’s supporting arm.

  Maud settled her on the sofa, covered her with a comforter and put water on for tea. “Want me to call Lizzie?”

  “No! I don’t even want to see you.” Jeep looked about ten years old, huddled on the couch with the quilt drawn up around her. “Here I am sitting in your house when I wanted to kill you.” She used the edge of the quilt to mop at fresh tears. “If you hadn’t been with him, if he hadn’t told me how much better he was going to be. And he was better, sort of. I don’t know. I want it to be someone’s fault. I want to blame Lizzie for wearing that skirt. She never wears skirts. But it’s him, it is. I can’t stand it. What am I going to do?”

  Her head went back in a fresh paroxysm of grief, face upturned, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut.

  It wasn’t just that Rich had shown up tonight, she sobbed, it wasn’t that he’d dropped Maud a note. It wasn’t just that she’d started drinking again, had smoked dope with Rich a few nights ago, had spent yesterday snorting cocaine and drinking beer and was too embarrassed to call her sponsor, much less go to an AA meeting, and was avoiding her house and not answering her phone in case her sponsor was trying to call. “It’s all those things, but the worst thing, the worst thing—” she would say, and start crying again, unable to speak. “It’s that, what it is, is . . .”

  Maud finally guessed. “Are you pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  Maud held out both hands to her. “Oh, Jeep.”

  “It’s just that Lizzie, oh God, Lizzie—”

  “Lizzie what?”

  “I was baby-sitting. She came home early. Rich was there and we were dancing. And she looked sexy and I was feeling fat and wearing these jeans that are old and tacky. I could see Rich coming on to her, and I could see she was coming on to him. She was,” Jeep said, as if Maud had contradicted her.

  “So then”—she pulled herself up to sit on the arm of the couch, perching there like some blonde gargoyle, her face a mask of hopelessness—“I thought the only way I’ll make Rich forget about her— That’s not right. The only way I’d make Rich think about me instead of her, and you, is—” She began to cry again, blurring her words. “Even though I told him I wasn’t going to make love with him until I knew for sure he was going to love me better, love me the way I keep telling myself I deserve—”

  She hit her forehead with the heel of her hand several times. “Stupid, stupid, stupid. Bart warned me. I got all kittenish and disgusting and he pulled over by the side of a road and got into the passenger seat. And you know how sometimes you get in a certain position and it just feels so good you can’t stop? You don’t want to stop? So I kept saying no but I kept moving against him at the same time. I’d been telling Rich ‘no,’ so we were both really horny. And then he came. Inside me. He was surprised too. I think he was going to just make me come, you know, before I went down on him, he likes that a lot—” Jeep stopped.

  “All guys like that a lot.”

  “They do, don’t they,” Jeep said, sniffing.

  “It’s nice when they get you to come first, though.” Maud got another wad of toilet paper from the bathroom. “So how late are you?”

  “Three days. And I never am. That’s why I know.”

  “Well, it could be that you’re just tense. Scared. That’s happened to me.” She thought of Driver and of the tenuous weeks she’d lived through when she first arrived in Marengo.

  “I can’t be pregnant,” Jeep wailed. “It’ll be the end of everything I’ve been working on, everything I want to change.” Her eyes welled up with tears again. “I don’t want to spend nine months of my life, and then the rest of my life, caring for a kid whose father I don’t even like.”

  “You might come to feel differently.”

  “And we got pregnant in a car.”

  This almost made Maud laugh. “Well, if you are pregnant, and you do decide to have it, those feelings might change.”

  Jeep shook her head. “I have to get an abortion. That’s all. I have to.”

  All the people who want babies and can’t have them, Maud thought. All the babies who have no parents and need them.

  “I mean, I think of you,” Jeep said. “How you keep saying you want a kid, and I’ve thought—I’ve thought so much in these three days, you can’t believe it, my brain is tired—I’ve thought, okay, Jeep, just have him, and give him to Maud. But can you just give a baby away? And anyway, there goes nine months. There goes my life. They’ll take away the scholarship. The rules were so intense to get that. They won’t give an award to someone whose belly’s big as a balloon and unmarried. And I don’t want to marry Rich. As if he wants to marry anyone. He hates kids. He’s told me so a hundred times. And after the baby’s born I have to take care of it, I won’t be able to go to school and I don’t have enough money as it is. And if I don’t go to school I’ll never—” She shook her head. “I’ll be stuck, stuck, stuck. Just like my mother. I swore I’d never do what she did. I was a ‘mistake.’ She’s told me so many times I ruined her life. And now I’ve gone and done the same thing. I won’t, I just won’t.”

  Maud held her. “It’ll all work out. Somehow it will.”

  “I want the life I’d been planning. I was finally being smart. But people w
ill call me a murderer.”

  “That’s only one point of view.” Maud thought of Jake’s sister—how often she must have to witness and give counsel to this.

  “They told my mother she’d be a murderer, that God would punish her. All my life she’s just hated me, told me a thousand times I wrecked her life. On the other hand, here I am, and there’s been times, recently, when I’ve been happy. Would I rather have not been here? You see what I mean? What should I do? It’s such a mess.”

  “You didn’t wreck her life,” Maud said. “And you would never tell a child such a thing.”

  “No.” Jeep nodded. “I know what it’s like. Not to be wanted. It’s the worst. So many times I just wanted to die. I was trying to die, most of my life. Once I almost succeeded. Lizzie will tell you. And now for the first time I’m starting to feel like living might be fun. I’m just getting my feet underneath me. And what do I do to myself?” She took a huge shuddering breath. “Could I sleep here?”

  “I wish you would.”

  “I need to pee and brush my disgusting mouth.” Jeep pushed back the quilt. Maud got a pillow and some sheets from the bedroom and made up the couch. From the bathroom Jeep said, “Rich will think I did it to trap him.”

  “Well, you know you didn’t.” Maud joined her in the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub. “That was one of the biggest reasons I was so careful about birth control when I was with Miles. So he could never accuse me of taking unfair advantage, of forcing the issue.”

  “Lizzie says if you’d just gotten pregnant with him, he might have come through.”

  “Unlike Lizzie, I was too chicken to find out.”

  “Rich doesn’t have to know, does he?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  The length of Maud’s nightgown emphasized how young Jeep was. Her face was shiny, scrubbed; her nose red, her eyes puffy. She pulled the quilt up to her chin. “I look awful.”

  “No, you look like you’ve cried. I’ve looked just like that more often than I want anyone to know.”